You don't eat carbs for the pump. It's right there in the paragraph -- you eat carbs to have glycogen, so you can lift more. Then you stop eating carbs to get shredded.
Your own quote just says it is an effect, not that it's the purpose.
Your own quote just says it is an effect, not that it's the purpose.
*some do, but the ones that do are not eating carbs
[0]https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/bodyb...
Olympic weight-lifting is constituted of the snatch and the clean and jerk. Power-lifting is normally constituted of the "big three" lifts: bench press, squat, and deadlift.
There is also an informally defined idea of "power-building"[3] which is sort of a cross between bodybuilding and power-lifting.
And then there's crossfit, and strongman, and ... Anyway, enough said about all of that. :-)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powerlifting
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_weightlifting
[3]: https://www.muscleandfitness.com/routine/workouts/workout-ro...
They didn't make that claim? Second sentence.
Specifically:
>This is probably the main reason high carb diets are so popular among bodybuilders
"This" meaning the pump, ie. the muscle size being inflated such that it isn't representative of true stength. Strictly speaking "pump" may not be the best word here (as opposed to size) but if you're making such a pedantic point at least say it directly.
I see this everywhere (and I suspect this isn't news to anyone). "How hard can farming really be?" "We just have to disrupt with tech synergies." And whatnot. I find this mindset to be offensive and such a self-own by limiting one's understanding of the state of things.
Bodybuilding, and in general fitness, asks for a lot of your time. How can one honestly think that these people aren't constantly endeavoring to optimize?
I imagine there are cases of a local maxima (am I using this correctly?) where something works well for generations and industries get a bit stuck doing it "the good ol' way." But I think that's more an exception than a rule.
For instance, the groupthink meta will optimize for time/schedule efficiency, for social dynamics, for all kinds of things which aren't muscle gain per second.
All of the online discussion and experimentation revolve around time limited gym workouts that make no sense when I can do a few sets a dozen times a day while taking breaks away from the desk, in between downtime while cooking or doing other chores, or while listening to teleconference meetings.
Scientists sometimes go through a lot of trial and error and fail, despite of using n>1, despite of collecting a lot of data and processing it with tricky statistical methods.
Just going through motions of trial and error doesn't guarantee a success. One can hope that he will do a gradient descent and will find a local minimum, but even this is not guaranteed, because for gradient descent you need to identify all the variables and measure all partial derivatives. And do this multiple times, for each step of gradient descent.
> they exist as a community of millions of people all trying things are reporting what works
Millions of flies cannot be wrong? I'm sorry, I cannot resist the urge to bring this phrase.
Lets try more rational arguments and start with the question: could these millions do a search for a global maximum?
1. Most of them do not track their progress, do not write things they do, and just relying on the innate abilities of their minds to learn the best way. So they reports of their results are not reliable. Probably they can be used to seek truth but one needs to be very careful and skillful to do this properly.
2. Just a few of them can measure the real result with high enough frequency. One needs an access to medical diagnostics to learn what their bulges consist of. Is this a lot of muscle fibers or not so much fibers but they are swelled? Why they are swelled? So really they can vaguely suspect what results they got after several months of adopting new training strategy.
3. They do not track failures. If someone tried their methods and failed, he would leave the scene quietly. So if these methods works only for a small part of self selected population, bodybuilders would remain in a blissful ignorance of the fact. It is a selection bias that can be substantial in bodybuilding.
So we know about some successes but we cannot attribute them reliably to a training strategy, because it may be the result of genes or medication or something else. And bodybuilders have incentives to lie: it is more honorable to get big muscles through pain and hard work than through a lot of medication or due to favorable gene combination. Most of them probably even do not lie consciously, they fool themselves while doing their "research" what works and what doesn't.
So I believe that all these millions of bodybuilders are not a reliable global maximizer. Just looking at data generated by them we cannot judge if they had found a global maximum or something else. Though they probably have found some local maximum, but we do not how good it is for a general population.
A great many actually don't care about strength and don't pay a lot of attention to PRs, 1RMs, etc. The goal is, after all, purely a subjective evaluation, and strength in a particular lift is no guarantee that the resulting physique will address the things a bodybuilder is trying to address.
In other words, for competitors the mirror is largely the only tool in the toolbox at the end of the day. I don't think it's as unusual as you suggest.
The main reason for high carb diets is the energy to lift more. It is not for a brief pump. (among bodybuilders)
Body builders are physique athletes motivated by aesthetics. Assuming body builders do indeed prefer high carb diets, we currently have two hypotheses here:
1. They've tracked their energy levels and the data convinced them that high carb diets improved their energy levels in the gym, which ultimately improves muscle growth over the long-term (your hypothesis).
2. They are motivated by the clearly visible improvement in aesthetics (article's hypothesis).
Gotta say the second seems more plausible on the face of it because it's directly tied to the motivation that defines this group, and doesn't require disciplined long-term data collection.
They used to be, but now the majority of competitions have actually moved towards sheer size. Arnold Schwarzenegger, among others, is a vocal critic of this so they actually created a new division called “Classic Physique” to address the problem which is now purely dedicated to aesthetics and proportion.